Pope Faces Mexicans Worshipping Skeletal 'Death Saint'

Pope Faces Mexicans Worshipping Skeletal 'Death Saint' [Excerpts]

Two weeks after baptizing her at a Catholic church, baby Adriana's parents put her in a white gown again for a second sacrament: This time, with Mexico's skeletal "Death Saint." As they held the sleepy three-month-old child, a priestess sprinkled holy water infused with rose petals on her in front of 300 people under a 22-meter (72-foot) statue of the Grim Reaper-like "Santa Muerte" in a Mexico City suburb.

When Pope Francis arrived in Mexico for a five-day visit [February 15], he [found] a country where devotion to Santa Muerte is growing fast despite the Vatican's rejection of the figure as blasphemous. Every Sunday, a big crowd comes to Enriqueta Vargas' outdoor temple in Tultitlan to pray in front of the black fiber-glass statue, which was erected in 2007 in a lot and can be seen from a busy boulevard. They leave tequila, candy and flowers at six chapels, where they pray for love, money or health.

Vargas has gone a step further than at other Santa Muerte shrines in Mexico by officiating over weddings and baptisms. Andrew Chesnut, professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, estimates that between 10 million and 12 million people follow Santa Muerte in Mexico, the United States and Central America. That leaves the Roman Catholic Church worried in Mexico. "This is the fastest-growing new religious movement not only in Mexico, but in the entire Americas," [Chesnut said].

The caretaker of Tultitlan's outdoor temple, Enriqueta Vargas, is a more recent convert to Santa Muerte. She became the leader of the place of worship after her son, who founded the temple, was gunned down in 2008. "I promised Santa Muerte that if she delivered my son's assassins, I would seek to take her message as far as possible," Vargas told AFP.

Felix Lugo, 74, believes that Santa Muerte made him fall in his bath in 2013, causing leg injuries, as punishment because he had hoped that a neighbor would fail to build a shrine in her honor. "I'm here to ask for forgiveness. I feel like I offended her," said Lugo, a Catholic follower of Mexico's patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe.

He wanted to know if he could worship both icons.

"Of course you can," Vargas told him.

(Laurent Thomet, "Pope faces Mexicans worshipping skeletal 'Death Saint'," Tultitlán, Mexico, AFP, 2/10/16).

[TBC: Roman Catholicism has been using "syncretism" ("the combination of different forms of belief or practice") by incorporating the pagan gods of other nations since its beginning. The early church of the Third Century that ultimately apostasized into Catholicism began by incorporating pagan beliefs into their teachings. It has been pointed out that Catholicism began to include Greek ideas into their theology very early on, confirming the warning of Paul in Acts:20:29-30 [29] For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. [30] Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.
See All...: "For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them."

"One early Christian writer of the 2nd and early 3rd century, Clement of Alexandria, demonstrated the assimilation of Greek thought in writing: "Philosophy hasbeen given to the Greeks as their own kind of Covenant, their foundation for the philosophy of Christ... the philosophy of the Greeks... contains the basic elements of that genuine and perfect knowledge which is higher than human... even upon those spiritual objects" (Clement of Alexandria. Miscellanies 6. 8 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Paganism#cite_note-4).]